In Washington State, Home of Highest Minimum Wage, a City Aims Higher

Heather Weiner of Yes for SeaTac, a political action committee that supports Proposition 1.Credit
Mike Kane for The New York Times

SEATAC, Wash. — Washington already has the highest state minimum wage in the country, at $9.19 an hour. Soon, voters in this tiny city south of Seattle will decide whether to push the local minimum even higher.

If a majority of the voters here say yes to a referendum known as Proposition 1 when their mail-in ballots start arriving this week, a minimum wage of $15 an hour would be required for many businesses in SeaTac, more than twice the federal minimum of $7.25.

The measure would lift wages for thousands of workers at one of the nation’s busiest airports, Seattle-Tacoma International, which is within city limits. But business and labor leaders say the economic and political implications, with local democracy going where state and federal legislators mostly fear to tread, could be equally profound.

In an era in which organized labor mostly plays defense, unions targeted SeaTac and managed the signature-gathering process that put Proposition 1 on the ballot, viewing it as a potential model for raising wages and mobilizing workers in other parts of the country.

The referendum, union leaders said, would pull thousands of struggling families a rung higher on the economic ladder — raising pay for about 6,500 workers in the city, on and off airport property — and would give paid sick days to many of those workers for the first time. (The airport, known as Sea-Tac, uses a hyphen in its name; the city does not.)

Opponents said the unions were manipulating a mostly blue-collar community and its hopes, dangling a prize that would not live up to promises. With a tiny number of residents in a position to decide — off-year elections typically draw around 7,000 voters — a battle is raging, pitting corporations and conservatives against unions and many immigrant and religious groups, with both sides knocking on doors, registering new voters and planting yard signs.

Photo

Abdirahman Abdullahi canvassing for the City of SeaTac’s referendum on a higher minimum wage.Credit
Mike Kane for The New York Times

“We want to achieve the American dream,” said Abdirahman Abdullahi, a Somali immigrant who earns $11.20 an hour after six years as a Hertz employee and who often works combined 70-hour weeks at two jobs to help support his family of four.

Opponents argue that increasing the minimum wage would have short-term benefits but would lead to long-term losses as businesses adapted by cutting employees, raising prices or moving out.

“Folks involved with this are taking advantage of the good intentions of other people,” said Rick Forschler, a SeaTac City Council member who is fighting the measure. He said he feared that incentives to start or expand a business in the city itself would be stunted no matter what happened at the airport.

Another Council member, Mia Gregerson, is swinging hard the other way, reminding voters about the economic inequality that haunts their community even as the high-tech, high-salary economy of Seattle soars some 15 miles to the north. About 10 percent of the workers potentially affected by the referendum live in SeaTac.

“The middle class is disappearing,” said Ms. Gregerson, who grew up in the city. “We have people starving. We have people going homeless.”

Opponents assert that if higher wages drive up prices for airport food, people will vote with their feet.

Photo

Bob Donegan at his company’s restaurant in the Seattle-Tacoma airport.Credit
Mike Kane for The New York Times

“If you’re going to have a 30 percent increase in food prices, it will mean a lot of people will eat outside the airport,” said Bob Donegan, the president of Ivar’s, a seafood company based in Seattle with a restaurant at the airport. “That’s not a good thing for the airport or its workers.”

Supporters, citing a report by the liberal research group Puget Sound Sage, said that travelers accounted for more than two-thirds of airport commerce, and that increasing pay to $15 an hour would inject $54 million into the local economy.

Arindrajit Dube, an associate professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who has studied minimum wage policies — San Francisco International Airport, for example, has a $12.93-an-hour minimum, enacted in 2000 — said localized rules did not appear to have much impact on staffing levels.

Higher wages do, however, attract more skilled workers and reduce employee turnover, Mr. Dube said, and over time that can change the composition of the work force.

David Rolf, the president of a Service Employees International Union chapter based in Seattle that worked to get the measure on the ballot, said success on Election Day could be the making of a pattern. “There are certainly a number of other cities where this idea might work,” he said.

The backdrop is a community of about 27,000 that has mostly been on the sidelines as good times happened elsewhere.

Photo

An Alaska Airlines jet taking off from the airport, where the airline has its hub. The airline sued to try to stop the referendum.Credit
Mike Kane for The New York Times

About one in six SeaTac residents live below the poverty line, according to federal figures, compared with about one in 10 in all of King County, which includes Seattle. Since the late 1990s, according to census data, the number of SeaTac children in poverty has nearly doubled, to about 31 percent.

“Fifteen dollars an hour would really help — it would enable people to pay their bills on time and fix up their houses,” said Chris Smith, 49, a father of three who until recently fueled aircraft for $10 an hour. He quit that job to work at Walmart for the same wage, he said, figuring he might as well do work that felt safer.

Maxford Nelsen, a labor policy analyst at the Freedom Foundation, a conservative research group in Olympia, Wash., said that if the referendum passed, its effects would erode job security across the board.

“When you combine all these elements together, we believe the initiative would be incredibly hostile to employment at Sea-Tac,” he said.

The measure would exempt airlines and small businesses, including restaurants with fewer than 10 employees.

But a spokesman for Alaska Airlines, which has its hub at Sea-Tac and filed a lawsuit this summer with other businesses trying to stop the referendum, said a $15 minimum wage would affect baggage contractors.

“If they have to pay their workers more, they would certainly pass that on to us,” said the spokesman, Paul McElroy. “We are in a very competitive industry.”

As the referendum approaches, airport revenue is booming.

“A record total of passengers spent a record amount of money eating and shopping last year at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport,” the Port of Seattle, which operates the airport, said in a news release this year. Among their purchases were 90,000 neck pillows and 20,000 copies of the book “Fifty Shades of Grey.”

A version of this article appears in print on October 14, 2013, on page A13 of the New York edition with the headline: In Washington State, Home of Highest Minimum Wage, a City Aims Higher. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe